Traffic Data Reports

The mission of the St. Anthony Police Department is to improve the quality of life by preserving the peace and safety of the community.

To help realize our mission, the Department is committed to better serving our communities through partnerships and the use of data in the decision-making process. To that end, we recently joined with several area police departments to participate in the recent Ramsey County Traffic Stop Data Initiative to collect and disseminate data related to all police traffic stops.

Categories represented in data collection include the race and gender of each driver stopped, reasons for the stop, and reasons for issued citations, among others. A complete copy of the 2017 report of the data can be found below.

Among the key findings:

The vast majority of motorists that were stopped by the St. Anthony Police Department in 2017 resided outside of its patrol communities.

Of the 2,104 traffic stops in the cities of St. Anthony and Lauderdale in 2017, a majority of the stops were for moving violations, which is consistent with the traffic safety objective of the Department.

There was relative consistency within each racial group in regard to the reason a traffic stop was initiated, the gender of the driver, and the number of stops that resulted in a person or vehicle search.

The City of St. Anthony has noted inconsistencies in the way that data is collected among jurisdictions that make some categories of direct city-to-city comparison problematic. For example, while some organizations have adopted a race category of “other” the St. Anthony Police Department requires officers to use their best judgement when indicating the race of individuals without the option of “other.” With that in mind, we are evaluating our own systems and working with other organizations to better standardize the data collection process.

After completing the City’s first year of this particularly vigorous data collection endeavor and system building process, we are still learning and identifying areas for growth. Going forward, the St. Anthony Police Department remains committed to monitoring the data, ongoing training of our personnel, looking for ways to improve our services in a procedurally equitable way, and better understanding of factors that might lead to demographic disparities in service delivery. We are excited for the opportunities now available through our new data collection system.